“The lawsuit is without merit. We will contest it vigorously,” Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president at the network, said in a brief statement Thursday.

Beef Products filed the suit in Union County, S.D., where the company is based.

More than 200 people lost jobs in Amarillo when the company shut down the facility, along with two others in Iowa and Kansas, in response to the dramatic drop in demand for its product.

The Amarillo plant made more than 200,000 pounds of lean, finely textured beef per day.

“Now we have five people and myself in Amarillo. There were about 235 people laid off,” said Clay Perry, production plant coordinator at the plant. “It’s not a good situation.”

The product is made from beef trimmings — in Amarillo from Tyson Fresh Meats — that are heated slightly to melt fat and then spun to remove the fat. The resulting product then goes to processing companies and supermarkets that incorporate it into ground beef that is sold fresh, in patties and cooked in other products.

Federal regulators said the product meets food safety standards, but critics said it could be unsafe and represents industrialized food production.

“Through nearly 200 false, misleading and defamatory statements, repeated continuously during a monthlong disinformation campaign, ABC and other individuals knowingly misled consumers into thinking (lean finely textured beef) was not beef and not safe for public consumption, which is completely false,” said Dan Webb, chairman of Winston & Strawn LLP, the law firm representing the company.

The company’s production fell 80 percent in the wake of the coverage, said Nick Roth, son of the company’s founders and director of engineering.

Beef Products officials said they hope educating the public about what happened will help the business.

“It really hasn’t changed much. We’re still largely in the same boat. We haven’t been able to ramp up,” Roth said. “The lawsuit will show the substantial damage we incurred. It’s an important first step to re-establishing the business.”

Pressure on the company and its customers also came from comments from bloggers and celebrities such as chef Jamie Oliver and an online petition asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to keep the meat product out of school lunches.

This suit might break new ground in South Dakota.

“As far as I know, our courts haven’t applied this statute,” said Patrick Garry, a law professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law.

Proving disparagement in this kind of case requires proving someone knowingly and falsely claimed a perishable food product was unsafe for public consumption, according to the South Dakota act covering food product disparagement.

The amount of science involved can complicate things.

“It’s a harder case to prove than an individual defamation case, like if I sued your newspaper, because the statute requires a high knowledge threshold of the falsity of the claims at ABC,” Garry said.

While Beef Products is shut down in Amarillo, Cargill still makes a similar product in Plainview using small amounts of citric acid, instead of similarly small amounts of ammonia as Beef Products did, to combat bacteria. However, the “pink slime” controversy also has cut production at Cargill plants, officials said.

Cargill has gained federal approval for a label to identify what it calls “finely textured beef,” or FTB, and the company has completed a first wave of consumer research.

“We also found that once consumers understood how FTB is produced, they had no issue with it and understood its value,” Martin said.

Cargill is working with its wholesale customers on a strategy to reintroduce finely textured beef into their products.

“There is no legitimate reason for excluding (it), other than the misperception created by social media and some news media during the frenzy last March,” Martin said.

Both companies promote the facts that the USDA approved the product and process in 1993 and the product is 100 percent beef and more than 95 percent lean.

The case echoes the Oprah Winfrey trial in 1998 in Amarillo’s federal court. The Texas Beef Group sued her show and guest Howard Lyman for allegedly knowingly and falsely portraying American beef as unsafe after a panic in Britain over mad cow disease. Judge Mary Lou Robinson gave the Winfrey defendants victories on most counts, and a jury rejected the disparagement claim.

“The court noted that the guest’s remarks were simply hyperbolic, and as this court noted previously, ‘exaggeration does not equal defamation,’” the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said when it ruled on the failed subsequent appeal.